The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
IN 1845, Marx and Engels made their now-famous observation that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
Transmitted through education, culture, the media and other institutions of knowledge, these dominant ideas not only govern how Western elites perceive their own societies but also non-Western ones.
Writing more than a century after Marx and Engels — but differing in their methodology Edward Said and Alain Grosrichard argued that capitalist-imperialist objectives in the Middle East have over time informed numerous distortions, misrepresentations and stereotypes found across a wide spectrum of media from British Victorian travelogues of Egypt to French Enlightenment essays on “Oriental despotism” to late 20th-century US journalism on the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
With the recent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, STEPHEN ARNELL gives the storied history of the British real-life left-wing urban guerillas
Huge protests against corruption and preventable deaths during flooding have rocked the government — the masses are not likely to be able to take direct control in their own interests yet, writes KENNY COYLE, but it’s a promising show of people power
Spain has joined South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel while imposing weapons bans and port restrictions, moves partly driven by trade unions — proving just how effectively civil society can reshape government policy, writes RAMZY BAROUD


